Learning Objective
A 'tectonic shift' in US macroeconomic policy that could cause increased capital investment and be bullish for sectors like financials and consumer durables may be up ahead, according to Morgan. This animation shows the plate tectonic evolution of the Earth from the time of Pangea, 240 million years ago, to the formation of Pangea Proxima, 250 millio. Noting “we are on the cusp of a tectonic shift in warfare,” Raymond said during his keynote address on the second day of the Air Force Association’s 2020 Air, Space & Cyber Conference that the law creating Space Force “gives us a huge opportunity to start with a clean sheet of paper to build a service from the ground up.”.
There has been a recent tectonic shift in voting patterns. A tectonic shift in societal trends occurred in the 1960s Recent Examples on the Web The spreading, smashing and plunging of tectonic plates shapes far more than just geography.
After studying this section you should be able to do the following:
- Appreciate how in the past decade, technology has helped bring about radical changes across industries and throughout societies.
This book is written for a world that has changed radically in the past decade.
![Shift Shift](/uploads/1/1/0/3/110344991/491197886.png)
At the start of the prior decade, Google barely existed and well-known strategists dismissed Internet advertising models (Porter, 2001). By decade’s end, Google brought in more advertising revenue than any firm, online or off, and had risen to become the most profitable media company on the planet. Today billions in advertising dollars flee old media and are pouring into digital efforts, and this shift is reshaping industries and redefining skills needed to reach today’s consumers.
A decade ago the iPod also didn’t exist and Apple was widely considered a tech-industry has-been. By spring 2010 Apple had grown to be the most valuable tech firm in the United States, selling more music and generating more profits from mobile device sales than any firm in the world.
Moore’s Law and other factors that make technology faster and cheaper have thrust computing and telecommunications into the hands of billions in ways that are both empowering the poor and poisoning the planet.
Social media barely warranted a mention a decade ago, but today, Facebook’s user base is larger than any nation, save for China and India. Firms are harnessing social media for new product ideas and for millions in sales. But with promise comes peril. When mobile phones are cameras just a short hop from YouTube, Flickr, and Twitter, every ethical lapse can be captured, every customer service flaw graffiti-tagged on the permanent record that is the Internet. The service and ethics bar for today’s manager has never been higher.
Speaking of globalization, China started the prior decade largely as a nation unplugged and offline. But today China has more Internet users than any other country and has spectacularly launched several publicly traded Internet firms including Baidu, Tencent, and Alibaba. By 2009, China Mobile was more valuable than any firm in the United States except for Exxon Mobil and Wal-Mart. Think the United States holds the number one ranking in home broadband access? Not even close—the United States is ranked fifteenth (Shankland, 2010).
The way we conceive of software and the software industry is also changing radically. IBM, HP, and Oracle are among the firms that collectively pay thousands of programmers to write code that is then given away for free. Audacity google. Today, open source software powers most of the Web sites you visit. And the rise of open source has rewritten the revenue models for the computing industry and lowered computing costs for start-ups to blue chips worldwide.
Cloud computing and software as a service is turning sophisticated, high-powered computing into a utility available to even the smallest businesses and nonprofits.
Data analytics and business intelligence are driving discovery and innovation, redefining modern marketing, and creating a shifting knife-edge of privacy concerns that can shred corporate reputations if mishandled.
And the pervasiveness of computing has created a set of security and espionage threats unimaginable to the prior generation.
As the last ten years have shown, tech creates both treasure and tumult. These disruptions aren’t going away and will almost certainly accelerate, impacting organizations, careers, and job functions throughout your lifetime. It’s time to place tech at the center of the managerial playbook.
Key Takeaways
- In the prior decade, firms like Google and Facebook have created profound shifts in the way firms advertise and individuals and organizations communicate.
- New technologies have fueled globalization, redefined our concepts of software and computing, crushed costs, fueled data-driven decision making, and raised privacy and security concerns.
Questions and Exercises
- Visit a finance Web site such as http://www.google.com/finance. Compare Google’s profits to those of other major media companies. How have Google’s profits changed over the past few years? Why have the profits changed? How do these compare with changes in the firm you chose?
- How is social media impacting firms, individuals, and society?
- How do recent changes in computing impact consumers? Are these changes good or bad? Explain. How do they impact businesses?
- What kinds of skills do today’s managers need that weren’t required a decade ago?
- Work with your instructor to decide ways in which your class can use social media. For example, you might create a Facebook group where you can share ideas with your classmates, join Twitter and create a hash tag for your class, or create a course wiki.
References
Porter, M., “Strategy and the Internet,” Harvard Business Review 79, no. 3 (March 2001): 62–78.
Shankland, S., “Google to Test Ultrafast Broadband to the Home,” CNET, February 10, 2010.
At its most powerful, education harnesses our natural curiosity as human beings to understand the universe and everything in it. This week on the blog, we’re exploring what it means to actually reach into knowledge – and why developers are at the forefront of how the next generation is learning about the world they live in.
Seeing a geological diagram in a textbook is one thing. But reaching out and creating massive volcanoes with your bare hands? Rearranging the continents by searching for hidden fossil patterns? Now you’ve got some magic in the classroom.
Educational gaming is on the verge of a major turning point, and one of the leading forces is Gamedesk – an LA-based research institute, commercial development studio, online community platform, and physical school.
Recently, Gamedesk released a lengthy white paper detailing how they built a set of “kinesthetic learning” games that teachers can use to teach complicated geoscience concepts to students aged 12 to 15. These include Leap Motion games GeoMoto and Pangean, which let you rearrange continents, shift tectonic plates, and form volcanoes. Pangean and Geomoto are both available for free download on Gamedesk’s websiteand on our Developer Gallery.
Pangean
Formerly known as Continental Drift, this puzzle game introduces the essentials of continental drift before moving on to plate tectonics. As a galactic member of the United Colonies, you travel the universe in your own scouting ship – using your hologram interface to piece together continents and demonstrate the shift that occurs over a hundred million years.
Tectonic Shift Madam Secretary
Use the fossil probe to reveal patterns in creature inhabitance and the sonar to scan for eroded portions of the continent. Your final mission? Returning present-day Earth to its Pangaea state! To help students absorb the lesson, teachers can ask: Why do you think the continents can be connected with each other? How did you use fossil remains to help you connect continents up? And why do you think similar fossils are found in different continents now?
GeoMoto
Building on their insights from the other three games in the series, GeoMoto (formerly Plate Tectonics) gives players a more direct relationship to geo-concepts. In other words, pulling, smashing, and grinding tectonic plates together!
Using the Leap Motion Controller, players navigate around a world with no geographic features, then shift and experience the motion of the plates with hand movements. You can see how plate tectonics create volcanoes, folded mountains, rift valleys, and seafloor spreading, then learn about different types of faults and the Richter scale.
Kinesthetic Learning and the Future of Education
Tectonic Shifts
Geoscience is a complicated subject that involves thinking about the Earth as a fluid and complex system that’s constantly changing. These can be difficult concepts for kids, so Gamedesk used a kinesthetic learning approach to shed new light on the subject. This is a learning style that lets students engage physically with complex subjects through movement and action, rather than just watching a video.
Along with the creative and educational possibilities of virtual reality, we’re excited to see where motion-controlled gaming will take the next generation of students. You can download Pangean and Geomoto from Gamedesk’s website. Be sure to check out their white paper to learn about how the games were researched, built, and tested – including lesson plans and resources for teachers!